Give Me My Stuff Back! How to Recover Your Data (Mostly) Free and Easy
Give Me My Stuff Back! How to Recover Your Data (Mostly) Free and Easy
Posted 01/21/2011 at 2:39pm
| by Brian Mahoney
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Accidentally hit that delete button? Having a hard drive failure? Help is here. Let us take you through the step to get that data back in your hands.
Data recovery software doesn’t have quite the same flash as anti-virus software. While new computers generally come bundled with some type of A/V application, there isn’t nearly as much attention paid to recovering lost data. Microsoft jumped into the AV fray by providing users with Windows Defender but they seem curiously absent when it comes to data recovery. Sure, there’s Recovery Console but that’s not much help when Windows itself can’t read from the drive in question. When you lose data, it’s a technology emergency – without any ability to dial 911. Let us be the calm-voiced 911 operator walking you through the steps you need to recover your data.
What seems to be the Trouble here?
If you’ve deleted a file or formatted a drive and you want to retrieve some or all of the data, jump ahead to the “Now Infamous Software” section which details software that will help and consider yourself lucky. You have a drive that is still functioning and your computer knows it’s there. But, and this is vital, make sure you STOP using the drive immediately. Eject it, unhook it, power it down…whatever it takes to make sure your operating system doesn’t write tothe drive. If you don’t do this right away, your data will be much harder or impossible to get back.
If you've mutilated, mashed, dropped, or drop-kicked your drive and it’s making nasty sounds, then your best bet is to move directly to professional data recovery. Unless you’re a super guru, there isn’t anything you can do yourself.
Although it’s an infrequent occurrence, some drives just give up the ghost, through no fault of your own. If your hard drive is dead- no sound and no vibrations at all- check out our tips about electrical failures. We’ve got a trick or two that you’ll want to try before you start shelling out greenbacks for professional help.
If there doesn’t seem to be any physical problem with the drive, then you have two paths to choose. If your computer sees the drive but doesn’t recognize it as a functioning unit, it could mean that the file system has been corrupted. The whole drive might be askew or it might simply be the File Allocation Table that’s somehow gotten a bit sideways. As long as there is activity in the drive, that would be some vibration and some normal spinning noises, you’ll most likely be able to retrieve your data.
However, if you have a RAID setup and it isn’t recognized, or if you have more than one partition on a drive and your OS can’t see them all then you’re in a bit deeper. Start with the now "Infamous Software” suggestions to see if anything there can help.
Anything to do with RAID is reasonably complicated so it goes to figure that a RAID failure is equally as complicated; basically, don’t have unrealistic expectations of a free software application solving all of your RAID woes. Keep in mind, your RAID problem might be your hardware controller. (While we’ll mention RAID with each piece of software in this article, we’re dealing primarily with single drives here.)
A Quick Side-Note On Flash Drives and Alternate OS’es.
The bulk of this article applies to hard disk drives, not SSDs. The data recovery programs we describe here work pretty much the same on flash drives, SSDs and even floppies– the only difference being the mechanical/electrical problems. The beauty of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, making them far less susceptible to bumps and knocks than traditional hard drives. Additionally, we are concentrating on Windows, so if you’re using Linux, the physical problems are cross-platform however the software solutions are often not. Not to worry: we’ll let you know what works with your OS and what doesn’t.
Are You Sure? – The Mis-Click
Before you format a drive or delete a file, your OS will try to determine if you realize what you’re about to do. In spite of this, sometimes we make mistakes. Fatigue, confusion, stress can add up to a thoughtless mouse click and suddenly your blood runs cold.
For some of those moments, your operating systems’ failsafe, aka the trash bin/recycling bin, will be your saving grace. If you’ve accidentally deleted a file, check the trash bin first before you run off screaming. If it’s not there, try the free/cheap solutions listed in the now "Infamous Software” section
We said it earlier, but it’s important enough to bear repeating: whatever you do, as soon as you realize something is amiss, stop using the drive. Once more: Stop. Using. The. Drive. Why? Well, your operating system writes data to your hard drive almost constantly, even if you aren’t saving files or processing any work. When a file is deleted, it’s still on the drive in a kind of limbo state. The markers telling the filesystem that the data there is a part of a specific file have been removed, so your operating system simply doesn’t see it anymore. Since your OS considers the space that the file took up as essentially open space, it will write over it at some point if you continue to use the drive in question. Once a file has been overwritten, it’s virtually impossible to recover.
A Quick Side Note on Spare Drives:
Although it seems obvious, we’ll say it anyway: don’t try to recover files to the same drive that you’re trying to repair. That’s like cutting off a tree branch that you’re sitting on. If it’s a flash drive, use your computer’s hard drive to save the files. If it’s an external drive in question, make sure that you have sufficient room on another drive to cover the quantity of data that you’re recovering. And make sure that you aren’t running your computer from the same drive that you’re trying to repair. That just won’t work people! What will: either run the recovery software from an optical disk or flash drive, or take the OS drive out of the computer and put it into an external setup and retrieve the data from it.
The In-Famous Software Section
The Big Easy – Recovering recently deleted files from a photo flash drive
Flash drive and cards are everywhere; in your cell phone, your digital camera and maybe your camcorder. Recovering files from these units is as easy as downloading some free software, installing it, and running it.
What kind of free software, you ask? Let’s start with Piriform’s Recuva, which has saved our bacon many times. And by bacon, we mean, data. Aside from being free, it’s also simple and quick. Install it, open it and tell it which drive you want it to scan. Recuva will do the rest, including recovery of the original filename if there is enough of that information left.
On the left side of the GUI, you’ll see the filename, the path to it, when it was last modified, its size and whether the file can be recovered. Green, orange and red buttons next to the file name are a visual aid to quickly let you know what your recovery chances are for the file. If you’re lucky, you might be able to preview photo files on the right side.
Recuva will work with hard drives, flash drives, camera cards and MP3 players, but only on a Windows computer. It also works well with Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail.
If you’ve formatted a drive, Recuva will find whatever files it can. If Word has crashed, sic Recuva on to the drive and you’ll be back typing the next great novel in no time at all. Recuva has two settings; the Deep Scan takes longer than the normal scan but should be able to recover more data. There’s even a portable version of Recuva that you can take with you on a removable drive, however, it doesn’t play well with RAID.
We used Recuva on a 4 gig flash drive that had been used for data transfer between computers for over two years. Recuva was able to find and recover hundreds of files that other free programs, (specifically DiskDigger Data Recovery Wizard),were unable able to find at all. On a deep scan, DiskDigger found a few more files but due to the limitations of the program, only one gig of data could be retrieved for free. While Data Recovery Wizard also has the same one gigabyte limitation, Recuva has no such limitation. As long as Recuva is around, we’re wondering why anyone would go anywhere else for data recovery.
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miraz
December 23, 2011 at 5:46am
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musafir
December 23, 2011 at 5:15am
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musafir
December 21, 2011 at 5:15am
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miraz
December 21, 2011 at 4:03am
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Biceps
February 08, 2011 at 8:37pm
Great article, thanks. However, when you recommend software, would it be possible for you to provide a hotlink to the software page? I don't see links for either Recuva or TestDisk.
icrazy
January 25, 2011 at 11:50pm
After the website redesign, the "Print" button is nowhere to be seen. It is useful for people like me to save Maximum PC articles to PDF format. Please bring the "Print" button back. Thanks!
tiger_shark
January 25, 2011 at 9:55am
i have a question regarding data retrieval.
my system crashed, apparently an os issue. when i tried to reboot, kept giving me stop code 0x7b, unmountable boot volume, can't even get on to safe mode. so i tried to boot from my os cd w/c is a win7 ultimate 32bit, can't even do a startup repair.
so i tried to install, well, because i was dumb & careless, i actually installed win7 on my laptop. but when i checked my hdd, it only says 120GB on it. this laptop has 320GB in total hdd size.
next thing i did was i installed win xp pro, this to my knowledge would let me make the correct partition on my hdd.(another boneheaded move)
before it crashed, this originally had 3 partitons. 120GB for the os, 100GB for the 2nd partition & remaining 99GB was for the 3rd partition.
another detail i would like to add is, i installed true crypt 2 days before my sys crashed. w/c ironically, i was just 2 damn days shy of buying an external hdd since i just received my Christmas bonus that time.
i have tried several data retrieval programs like Sys Mechanic, Easus, GetDataBack to no avail. Right now, I have formatted the other 2 partitions but I still didn't save anything on it except for my drive C.
on all of those data retrieval programs i used, i keep getting a bunch of trash like a Shockwave file over 2GB in size which actually would sum up to the same size as my partition on drive D.
is it high time for me to require the services of a professional? what i would really like to get back are just the pictures of my babies which have been arranged chronologically like when they were in their 1st month & so on.
i know i'm pretty stupid not making backup copies or even as simple as uploading them to imageshack or photobucket, but at this point, i need an option how i can go about with this.
thanks!
ShyLinuxGuy
January 22, 2011 at 6:41pm
I like the new website! Pretty sweet!
I have a system of creating backups: I ditched my old way of backing up my stuff (moving onto external hard drive) and do it the old fashioned way. I created a whole backup of ALL of my files on to three separate sets of DVDs (each set has 2 DVDs). I have a set in my car, a set that I gave my friends and a set at home. The backups are zipped and password-protected.
I have a folder named "new" on my desk--EVERY newly created or downloaded file ends up in this folder until the end of the week, when I burn the files to a CD-RW (if they are important enough). When I obtain ~4.5 GB of backups from the set of CD-RWs, I burn the contents to a DVD and call it "Incremental Backup mm/yyyy", and the CD-RWs get erased for use again.
Also, I have an ancient Dell under my desk that I use as a simple file server (Samba). I move the contents of "New"
onto the server. And then again, I have a drawer full of flash drives and my external hard drive.If my hard drive was to die right now, it would be a minor inconvenience. I'd have to wait a few days for the UPS guy to deliver my new drive, reinstall Ubuntu and Windows, and transfer my files and settings back on.
TsunamiZ
January 21, 2011 at 10:55pm
Warning: Recuva is no good for recovering deleted partition [most files aren't found even with deep scan]. I recently tried it January 2011 using the latest version on an NTFS drive. I ended up having to use another software to do that.
gothliciouz
January 21, 2011 at 4:33pm
ok so they didn't mention how to recover data on raid, or what pogram to use.
how about my drive that caught fire?.. litteraly was in flames..i don't know if even the pros can recover data from a toasted drive.
on a side note: the pic with the cat inside the case, is hilarious :)
Fecal Face
January 22, 2011 at 1:07am
I've recovered data on raid before, but for some reason it didn't work. I used "Raid Reconstructor", and some other recovery program made by the same company. It recovered all the files, but they all seemed to be corrupted somehow - videos wouldn't play, images wouldn't show, etc.
The two programs cost money though, but I pira- I mean borrowed them off a friend.
Eoraptor
January 21, 2011 at 6:30pm
It's theoretically possible. They recovered a decent amount of data from the hard drives that were on Columbia when it disintegrated on reentry. HOWEVER... your probably looking at tens of thousands of dollars with a limited chance of success.
And yes, sadly they did skip over RAID despite the promises.
geewhipped
January 21, 2011 at 4:22pm
Use SpinRite for a while and you'll be a true believer. It has saved my data (or, more often, the data of one of the employees at my company) many many times...Often when the drive is physically screwed up, including making the terrible clicking sounds. All it has to do is make the drive work long enough to get the data off, and spinrite often does that.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
FWIW, spinrite was written by Steve Gibson, and he's friggin' awesome.
Nailer669
January 23, 2011 at 6:10pm
Depending on size and amount of bad sectors, it could take hours to days to finish.
I've used the freezer trick on a few drives.
Get Data Back has also worked on deleted files or drives with bad sectors that spinrite got Windows to recognize.
jeffhex
January 21, 2011 at 7:05pm
I've seen this program work miracles, regardless of the OS, on mine and other peoples drives. It can take a long time to run, though.
I've got it running on one failed 80GB SATA drive right now. Over 10 days straight and almost through testing 5% of the drive. Really.
geewhipped
January 21, 2011 at 7:25pm
This is true. I let it run for 2 months on a drive once just to see if it could pull it out (it didn't, the drive was totally screwed).
Luckily, once it gets through the rough spot (which hopefully isn't covering too many sectors), it'll fly (relatively speaking) through the rest of the drive.
I just had a coworker bring me a computer the other day...his wife ran a small business db on it and it sat under a desk for 9 years with no maintenance whatsoever. Started BSOD'ing on every boot so they couldn't even create a backup of the stupid proprietary DB (which hadn't been backed up for months). Spinrite fixed it up in a few hours and I was able to boot it and get the data off. He was very happy. They probably still won't do proper backups.
Bullwinkle J Moose
January 21, 2011 at 4:12pm
Speaking of Backups,
A lot of forums focus on fixing Windows instead of restoring backups
I've seen hendreds of forums recommending that you waste days or weeks trying to fix what cannot be fixed
If its a Windows problem and not unrecoverable data, I just boot to Bart-PE and grab everything I need off of the boot drive, then restore a backup
Oh, and speaking of overwriting your data...
Boot drives for Internet computers should be thought of as Temporary storage
By making my boot partition no bigger than 16GB, I can just restore a backup in 60 seconds or less for a basic Windows install and overwrite all remaining free space by copying old backups and some .MP3's from my D: drive to C:\temp untill I have ZERO bytes free
Now just delete the temp directory and your boot drive is completely sanitized!
I was baffled at all the forum articles online showing you how to waste hours trying to hide your Internet activity when you can just overwrite every single byte in less than 3 minutes on a 16GB partition
Total time to restore a backup and sanitize a boot partition = 5 minutes (16GB)
Eoraptor
January 21, 2011 at 6:37pm
Well for one thing, that depends on the backup scheme you use. If you're restoring from a ghosted image, then you're probably restoring those files to the exact same blocks they were in before and have not actually over-written much at all, whereas if your restoring from an iso or simple file copy bin, you probably are overwriting things.
And most people aren't running daily or weekly backups, and reinstalling windows will entail downloading weeks or months, perhaps even a years-worth of various program updates, patches, et all. so in the long run spending two hours nuking temp files is less time-intensive for the average user than 4-8 hours to reinstall and redownload all their stuff if they are that paranoid about their tracks (when they should be using passweords, porn sessions, and proxies in the first place anyway)
Bullwinkle J Moose
January 22, 2011 at 1:14pm
You should really stop assuming what others did or will do
what I did was valid for the backups I make
savage4naves
January 21, 2011 at 3:50pm
The new website design looks great!
I hate seeing the message “The drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?” Hopefully this program works as advertised.
dentaku
January 21, 2011 at 3:47pm
The article says it's was posted by Amber but the little photo next to the title is of Brian Mahoney.
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